Free Radicals
Architecture builds norms, and Radical Pedagogies’ project is to question the discipline’s fundamental assumptions.
KwieKulik Game on Morel’s Hill, 1971 Courtesy KwieKulik Archive
Radical Pedagogies, edited by Beatriz Colomina, Ignacio G. Galán, Evangelos Kotsioris, and Anna-Maria Meister. MIT Press, 416 pp., $60
Another title for this book might be Radical Pedagogies in Architectural Education, 195X-198X, but that kind of specificity would undermine its world-shaking ambitions. This is a volume that wants to have an impact beyond a delimited time and place, to radicalize pedagogy now and then, here and there. But the desire to get to the root of things is also, to some extent, a historical condition: People don’t necessarily want to return to first principles at all times; in fact, such investigations are relatively rare, bubbling up at moments of crisis. “Everything once considered normal had become the object of scrutiny,” Annie Ernaux writes in The Years, describing life in France in the immediate aftermath of May ’68. “The family, education, prison, work, holidays, madness, advertising, every aspect of reality was questioned.” One could include architectural education, too. Where are you coming from? Who do you s…
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